In 1975, for a diversion from his law studies at Boston University, David Levin hopped aboard a hot-air balloon and took a little ride. “It was fun, but I had no great aspirations as a balloonist,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1985.

That would change. In the 10 years after stepping into a balloon basket for the first time, he became the first balloonist to soar over Pikes Peak in Colorado, reaching a height of more than 14,000 feet, and won the 1985 World Hot Air Balloon Championship in Battle Creek, Mich.

The best was yet to come. In 1992, by winning the World Gas Balloon Championship in Obertraun, Austria, he became the only pilot to capture world championships in hot-air and gas balloons. Later that year, he completed ballooning’s triple crown when he won the Gordon Bennett Cup in Stuttgart, Germany, a distance event in which he flew a little more than 964 miles in 44 ½ hours.

In 25 years of competition, Mr. Levin racked up victories in numerous national and international contests, ascending to the highest of highs and descending to the lowest of lows.

In 2000, he set a distance record for the National Gas Balloon Championship when he and his brother, Alan, traveled 1,998 miles from Albuquerque to Gorham, Me., in his final victory. In the 1995 Gordon Bennett Cup, however, he was in one of three American balloons that wandered across the border from Poland into Belarus. Belarussian combat aircraft opened fire, turning one balloon into a fireball and killing its two pilots. Mr. Levin and the three other American pilots, after making a forced landing, were briefly held prisoner.

Mr. Levin died on May 13 at 68 at his home in Boulder, Colo. His wife, Roberta, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

David Norman Levin was born on June 10, 1948, in Newark. His father, Martin, was a successful real estate developer. His mother, the former Jean Berman, was a homemaker.

David grew up in South Orange, N.J., and took flying lessons before he passed his driving test, pedaling his bicycle to a nearby airport. After graduating from Columbia High School, he enrolled at Boston University, where he earned a degree in business administration in 1971, a law degree in 1975 and a master’s in tax law in 1976.

An avid sky diver, skier and hiker, he was less than enthusiastic about a legal career, so he offered a receptive ear when a childhood friend and ballooning enthusiast approached him with a proposition: Why not open a ballooning resort? His friend had a spot in mind, a former sheep ranch in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado.

Image

Mr. Levin on a balloon ride. He was in law school in 1975 when he went up in a hot-air balloon and changed the course of his life.CreditRoberta Levin

The Balloon Ranch opened a year later, and Mr. Levin caught the fever. “From May to October, I flew almost every day,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1993. “It was magical — I felt like the Wizard of Oz and Phileas Fogg and Babar the Elephant all rolled into one.” He entered local balloon races and soon graduated to a professional tour of races in 10 cities.

Four years after winning the world hot-air championship, Mr. Levin won the national hot-air championship in Baton Rouge, La., outperforming his rivals in the completion of a graduated series of tasks, like dropping a marker — a four-ounce bean bag with a six-foot streamer — on a preselected target of his choice.

Mr. Levin, a fierce competitor, relied on a keen sense of shifting wind patterns and exhaustive preparation. He was known to arrive a week ahead of race day to study the terrain, taking notes on the movement of local cattle herds — pilots cannot drop markers within 500 feet of livestock — and training his throwing arm.

“I practiced throwing the marker for three or four years, or I never would have won the world championship,” he told The Christian Science Monitor. “Oftentimes, I have not been the closest to the target, but I threw the marker closest.”

He also won the 1988 Trans-Australia Bicentennial Balloon Challenge, the 1996 America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race and, on three occasions, the National Gas Balloon Championship.

He sold the Balloon Ranch, which never quite caught on, in 1982 and moved to Boulder, where he invested in real estate and kept a fleet of balloons in a hangar behind his house. For European races, he parked a balloon in Salzburg, Austria.

After his last race, at the World Air Games in Seville, Spain, in 2001, Mr. Levin retired from competition and began directing many of the races in which he once flew. He also served on the board of directors of Ignite Adaptive Sports, an organization that offers winter-sports lessons to the disabled.

In addition to his wife, the former Roberta Siegel, and his brother, he is survived by his children, Matthew and Rebecca Levin, and a sister, Susan Levin.

Competitive ballooning was, in his telling, more art than science. He laid his plans carefully, sending up dozens of toy helium balloons to select the perfect target based on wind patterns. But once he was aloft, instinct took over.

“The best pilots have a feel, an innate understanding of how the wind will move them,” he told Sports Illustrated. “When you are flying well, it is like meditating; firing the burner acts as your mantra.”

Correction:July 27, 2017

A headline on May 21 with an obituary about the balloonist David Levin misstated his age in some editions. As the obituary correctly noted, he was 68, not 88. This correction was delayed because the error was brought to the attention of editors only this week.